Arguing Religion

Argument is the way to turn even fierce opponents into allies.

The “I Have a Dream” speech21 was not a sermon; it was a political address. But its author did not feel that he had to relegate his religious faith to the private and subjective sphere. He knew that certain truth claims were central to his Christianity, and he did not hesitate to argue for them in the full glare of publicity. Though King met with f

The problem, however, is this: religions cannot be privatized precisely because they make truth claims, and the truth, by its very nature, is a public reality. It would be ludicrous to say, “I have a personal conviction that in a right triangle the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides.” And it would be

Though it can be practiced privately, religion must not intrude upon the open and secular debate of the public arena.

What commenced in Locke gained momentum throughout the modern period. One thinks of the move in the nineteenth century, so abhorred by John Henry Newman, to exclude religion from the circle of academic disciplines on the presumption that religion had to do with private and subjective matters.

Locke, persuasively enough, argued that religious toleration was good for religion, since no authentic conversion can be compelled through legal constraint. And he held that such broad acceptance is legitimate precisely because the goal of the state (fostering the common public good) and the goal of religion (the saving of souls) are qualitatively

Theologian Stanley Hauerwas has maintained that the contemporary regime of tolerance has its roots in the ideological and political settlements that followed the devastating wars of religion in the aftermath of the Reformation. Because Protestants and Catholics couldn’t adjudicate their disputes about doctrine, religious practice, and authority thr

the hyper-valorization of tolerance has proven to be a major block to constructive argument about religious matters. For in our postmodern society, toleration of religion typically goes hand in hand with the radical privatization of religion, the relegating of faith to the arena of interiority and its practice to the level of a hobby.

authentic faith is not, in fact, infrarational; it is suprarational. The infrarational—what lies below reason—is the stuff of credulity, superstition, naiveté, or just plain stupidity, and no self-respecting adult should be the least bit interested in fostering or embracing it. It is quite properly shunned by mature religious people as it is by sci